ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how being exposed to a stimulus repeatedly affects liking for it. Social psychologists interested in this issue wanted to be sure that it was the number of exposures, and not participants suspicions, that were affecting liking for stimuli. Theodore Mita and his colleagues came up with an ingenious way of doing just that. They succinctly described the purpose of their study: to test the mere-exposure hypothesis so that there was virtually no possibility of sensitizing participants to the frequency-affect hypothesis. Social psychology investigates how people perceive and influence one another. A common starting point is to examine the merest of human interactions. Psychology attempts to explain the causes of things by conducting experiments. Mita and his collaborators did conduct an experiment, and so were in a position to infer causation.
